The bomb didn't win it

The idea that it was militarily necessary to drop the atomic bomb in 1945 is now discredited. The first exhaustive examination of Japanese, Soviet and US archives, by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, confirms the argument that Truman went ahead in order to get Japan to end the war quickly before the Soviet Union came into the Pacific war and demanded a say in Asia.

The use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not provide the US with the free hand it had wanted and has proved disastrous for the world.

It did not bring about surrender. With 62 Japanese cities destroyed by firebombs and napalm, Japan was not overwhelmed by the destruction of one more. The army minister, General Korechika Anami, told the supreme war council that he would fight on. What actually brought about surrender was the combination of the Soviet Union's entry into the war on August 8 and the US decision to let Japan retain the emperor.

The use of the bomb led to an atomic arms race. Truman had been warned that the Soviet Union would interpret the use of the bomb as a threat but went ahead. After Stalin heard about the bomb from Truman at Potsdam, he said the US would try to use its atomic monopoly to force the Soviet Union to accept its plans for Europe, adding: "Well, that's not going to happen." The USSR exploded the atomic bomb in 1949 and the hydrogen bomb in 1953, far more quickly than Truman had believed possible.

Truman also helped to start the cold war. With a working atomic bomb, he believed that the US no longer needed Soviet help in Europe to make sure there was no re-emergence of a German threat, and went ahead with rearming the former Nazi state. All of which took America and Russia a further step from wartime cooperation to the cold war.

Max Hastings, on these pages last week, gave the impression that most of Truman's contemporaries thought he did the right thing. Eisenhower urged Henry Stimson, the secretary of state, not to use the bomb on the basis of his belief "that Japan was already defeated and that the dropping of the atomic bomb was completely unnecessary". Other commanders made similar statements. The men in command and on the ground did not share Hastings's argument that the "inexorable logic of war" meant the US had to drop the bomb.

What can we learn from this history? It is not one of damning Truman. What this history shows is that George Bush's dream of dominating the world through massive investments in new nuclear weapons repeats a failed project. It is no alternative to the hard work of developing political solutions to problems such as Iran and North Korea, or to building up disarmament treaties.

The end of the cold war has given us a second chance. Preparations at Aldermaston to build a nuclear weapon to replace Trident should stop, and the government should support Jack Straw's initiative to save the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and restart nuclear disarmament.

· Dominick Jenkins is Greenpeace UK's disarmament campaigner and author of The Final Frontier: America, Science and Terror